UNIVAC and the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation

Abstract

After building ENIAC, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly left the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 to sell electronic computers. Their company, incorporated in December 1947 as the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), built the BINAC for an aircraft maker and designed the UNIVAC, the first computer made in series in the United States. EMCC ran out of money and was sold to Remington Rand in 1950; the UNIVAC name outlived it through Sperry Rand and into Unisys, while the ENIAC patent the founders had filed was declared invalid in 1973.

A Partnership on Walnut Street

ENIAC was presented to the public in February 1946. A few weeks later its builders quarrelled with the university, which claimed the rights to their patents, and at the end of March Eckert and Mauchly left and formed a partnership, the Electronic Control Company, with an office on Walnut Street in central Philadelphia. A surviving business plan set the goal: a fast, general-purpose computer selling for $30,000 or less, with the first model ready within three years.

The first customer was the United States Census Bureau, which wanted a machine for the 1950 census. For legal reasons the bureau could not place the order itself, so the National Bureau of Standards acted for it, commissioning a study of a “UNIVersal Automatic Computer” in October 1946 and ordering the machine in June 1948. The contract was worth $300,000, with $75,000 up front for the memory, built from mercury delay lines, and a tape drive. Making the parts took until October 1947, by which time the money was running low.

On 22 December 1947 the partnership was incorporated in Philadelphia as the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which let it take in new shareholders. The HNF calls it the first company in the world devoted solely to electronic computers; it was not the first computer company, since Konrad Zuse had run an engineering office in Berlin that produced the Z3 and Z4 (see Konrad Zuse and the Z3). In 1948 EMCC moved into a former textile mill in northwest Philadelphia. The building still stands and carries a plaque naming the BINAC and the UNIVAC.

The BINAC

Help came from the aircraft company Northrop in California, which was developing the Snark, a jet-powered cruise missile meant to carry a nuclear warhead and steer itself with an onboard computer. In the autumn of 1947 Northrop ordered a small machine for preliminary studies, the Binary Automatic Computer or BINAC, priced at $100,000 with a $70,000 advance.

BINAC consisted of two identical processors that ran the same program side by side and compared results continuously to catch errors. Together they held 1,500 tubes; each had its own mercury memory of 512 words of 32 bits. An addition took 300 microseconds, a multiplication a millisecond. Instructions and data went in through eight keys, one per binary digit, and came out on a teleprinter, and the machine had a magnetic tape store. The two processors were finished in September 1948 and the whole system went to Northrop in the late summer of 1949. It was in use from 1950, though what it did there remains unclear, and it went to the University of California in Los Angeles in 1954, after which its trail is lost. In 1950 it was one of four all-electronic computers working in the United States, with ENIAC and the Bureau of Standards’ SEAC and SWAC, and the first built by a private manufacturer.

The Collapse

In August 1948 Harry Straus, whose company made electric totalisators for racetracks, invested $500,000. By 1949 EMCC had 134 employees, a larger building and six orders for the UNIVAC. Among the staff were three former ENIAC programmers: Kathleen McNulty, who married Mauchly in 1948, Jean Bartik and Betty Snyder. Grace Hopper joined in 1949 and stayed after the takeover. Mauchly shot 43 minutes of 16 mm film of the company that summer; the footage, much of it blurred with age, shows the nearly finished BINAC, the first UNIVAC under construction, its UNISERVO tape drives, and the staff on a company outing.

In October 1949 Straus was killed in a plane crash and his company withdrew its support. EMCC could not continue on its own, and in mid-February 1950 it was taken over by Remington Rand, a maker of typewriters, office equipment and weapons, where it continued as the “Eckert-Mauchly Division.”

UNIVAC I

On 23 March 1951 the first UNIVAC passed its acceptance test in the old EMCC building, watched by specialists from the Bureau of Standards and the Census Bureau, which took it over on 30 March and held a dedication on 14 June. It contained some 5,200 tubes (one HNF post gives 5,600) and 18,000 germanium diodes in a central unit 4.3 by 2.4 metres and 2.6 metres high. It worked in decimal: its memory, a set of mercury-filled tubes carrying ultrasonic pulses, held 1,000 words, each of twelve six-bit characters (eleven digits and a sign) or two instructions. It managed about 2,000 additions or 500 multiplications per second. Bulk data went on tape drives that used thin metal tape instead of plastic.

The machine stayed at the factory at first and processed data from the 1950 census there; it reached the Census Bureau in 1952. The first job it ran from start to finish was the 1954 economic census, and it was retired on 3 October 1963. Remington Rand built 46 UNIVAC I systems.

Election Night 1952

The fifth UNIVAC made the machine famous. On 4 November 1952 it sat in Philadelphia, linked by teleprinter to the CBS studio in New York, where a dummy console blinked for the cameras. At about 8:20 p.m. the anchor Charles Collingwood asked it for a forecast, and the teleprinter typed a greeting and nothing else. Two hours later NBC’s smaller Monrobot, with 800 tubes, called a landslide for Dwight D. Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson. UNIVAC had reached the same result early in the evening, but the team in Philadelphia had not dared to pass it on (see UNIVAC Called the Election Correctly, but CBS Hid the Result).

Election-night computing spread from there. The BBC rented an English Electric DEUCE for the general election of 26 May 1955, put an Elliott 402F in its television studio in 1959, and used a transistorised Elliott 803 in 1964; West German viewers first saw a computer projection at the federal election of 19 September 1965, when an IBM 1620 operated for the WDR named Ludwig Erhard the winner two and a half hours after the polls closed.

A UNIVAC in Frankfurt

In the summer of 1956 UNIVAC number 35 was dismantled and flown across the Atlantic in two transport planes, together with its console, printer and tape drives. It was reassembled at the Battelle Institute in Frankfurt am Main as the European Computing Centre, run by Remington Rand’s German subsidiary and directed by the German-American mathematician Carl Hammer, and opened on 19 October 1956. Customers bought computing time at 147 Deutschmarks for six minutes, and the centre trained operators and lent out programmers. Der Spiegel had run a cover story on electronic brains on 3 October, calling the 20-tonne machine the largest and fastest in Europe; the cover showed Norbert Wiener.

It was not the first computer in Germany. Heinz Billing’s G1 and G2 were running in Göttingen, Allianz had installed an IBM 650 in Munich in January 1956, the PERM followed in May, and a Zuse Z5 had worked at Leitz in Wetzlar since 1953 (see Germany’s Computing Pioneers). The machine, which had cost seven million marks, was switched off in February 1960, went to the Deutsches Museum in Munich in 1962, and its central unit has been on display there since 1988.

The ENIAC Patent

Eckert and Mauchly had filed for a patent on ENIAC on 26 June 1947. It was granted on 4 February 1964 as US patent 3,120,606, 207 pages with drawings, and by 1967 belonged to Illinois Scientific Developments, a subsidiary of Sperry Rand set up to collect royalties. Sperry Rand already had a cross-licensing agreement with IBM, so the targets were the smaller makers. On 26 May 1967 it sued Honeywell for $20 million; Honeywell, expecting the claim, had filed an antitrust suit against Sperry Rand the same day, a few minutes earlier.

The combined case was heard in Minneapolis by District Judge Earl Larson from 1 June 1971 to 13 March 1972: 135 trial days, 77 witnesses, more than 20,000 pages of transcript and over 30,000 exhibits. His 110-page decision of 19 October 1973 declared the patent invalid and unenforceable. The application had come too late, after ENIAC was already in use; von Neumann’s 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC anticipated parts of it; and Larson found that Mauchly had taken the idea of the automatic electronic digital computer from John Atanasoff, whom he had visited in 1941. Historians have since largely rejected that last finding (see ENIAC and the First Electronic Computers). According to the HNF, Sperry Rand agreed not to appeal and paid Honeywell three million dollars.

From Remington Rand to Unisys

Remington Rand bought a second computer maker, Engineering Research Associates, in 1952, and was itself bought in 1955 by the Sperry Corporation, an aviation-instruments firm that had built a tube computer of its own. The merged Sperry Rand sold its machines under the UNIVAC name, but within two or three years of the 1952 election IBM had overtaken it (see IBM: The Company). Sperry Rand took over RCA’s computer division in early 1972 and renamed itself Sperry Corporation in 1978.

By the mid-1980s the American mainframe market was IBM plus five smaller makers, Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell, known by their initials as the BUNCH. In 1986 Burroughs bought Sperry for $4.8 billion: the contract was signed on 27 May and the merger completed on 16 September. An employee, Christian Machen, won $5,000 in an internal contest for naming the new company Unisys. With $10 billion in annual sales and 120,000 employees it was the second-largest computer company after IBM. Its chief executive was Michael Blumenthal, born in Oranienburg in 1926, who had survived the war as a refugee in Shanghai and served in Jimmy Carter’s cabinet. Honeywell’s computer business went to the French Bull group in 1987.

Mauchly died in 1980, Eckert in 1995. Unisys, which earns most of its money from services, reported $2.03 billion in revenue for 2020 and a net loss of $317.3 million.